Category: Television

Now TV Box and Entertainment Month Pass

April 18th, 2014

Springsteen DVD included for scale!

You may have seen this advertised interminably on Pick TV, if, like me, you’ve been watching the re-runs of Futurama and/or Stargate Atlantis etc.

NowTV is Sky’s version of internet TV, offering a way of getting Sky content without a long-term contract or satellite dish or Sky+ box. The current introductory price for a NowTV Entertainment Month Pass is £4.99.

You can buy the pass and watch on a tablet or laptop, and you can also purchase (for just under a tenner) the NowTV Box, which is smaller, even, than the Apple TV box. It connects to an HDMI port on your TV, and your wireless network.

I’ve been wanting to sample Game of Thrones, among some other things. Pick have shown a few GoT episodes. I thought it looked all right, and at least had some interesting female characters. But I wasn’t interested enough to spend £55 on a Blu-Ray boxed set. Neither was I interested enough to pay £1.80 something per episode on Amazon’s streaming video service.

It occurred to me that with the current offer, NowTV is probably the cheapest way to watch GoT without committing yourself too much. For £35, I bought the box and a 6-month pass, which should give me plenty of time to plough through it. As others have pointed out, the box is a bargain, as it ships with an HDMI cable, which would cost you close to a tenner, or even more, if you were foolish enough to buy one at high street prices.

It arrived promptly, and was dead easy to set up. I must say, shipping the thing with the HDMI cable in the box takes a lot of hassle out of the situation. Sure, it’s a bit of a pain entering passwords and user names using the arrows on a remote control, but it was glitch free. Once up and running, it’s extremely efficient, getting to the Home screen and loading content much more quickly than any other internet content through my Sony TV and Blu-Ray.

Video quality may be an issue for some. I’ve read reviews that the live sport streams (paid for separately, a much more expensively) are a bit ropey. For me, 720p content is absolutely fine. You have to remember that most of the content being broadcast on Freeview is Standard Definition anyway. Most of the stuff I’ve got sitting on my shelves is SD (on DVD), and so 720p is already better. Anyway, if GoT was to be shown on Pick (or Five, if Sky/Discovery end up buying it), it would be shown in SD.

I’m inclined to only work with 720p on my own account, and I’ve always wondered why people are obsessed with 1080p, which only hogs more bandwidth and disc space than it really needs to. How clearly do you want to be able to see peoples’ chicken pox scars, anyway?

As to the service itself, be aware that only some Sky content is available from the beginning. Game of Thrones can be watched from the beginning of Season 1, but The Blacklist, which also interests me, perhaps because it’s still being broadcast, is only available on a Catch-up basis, which means, the most recent few episodes. I guess it depends whether Sky own the repeat rights, or something. With GoT, I would guess its availability is a sign that it won’t be available on a Freeview channel any time soon. Whereas The Blacklist? Maybe it will turn up on Four or Five at some point? Who knows. Anyway, I’ll watch what I can, and in six months I’ll decide whether to cancel the pass before paying for any more content.

(As well as Sky content, you can access iPlayer, 4oD, Demand Five, and other channels, including Vevo music videos.)

You have the option of buying passes for Movies and Sport, but (as indicated above), these cost more. I’ve got very little interest in either.
Panasonic SC-HTE80 TV speaker board with bluetooth – review

February 16th, 2014
I’ve been after something like this for a while. Years ago, I owned an analogue 5:1 speaker system (bought with my first Sony flat panel, which I bought when they were very expensive), but it was a colossal faff and the (wired) rear speakers were a pain. It was also a real dust-gatherer.

Since replacing it with a larger but cheaper HD Sony TV, I’ve been aware that the speakers in it weren’t up to much. Part of the problem of lacklustre sound is that the speakers have to fit into a thin case, designed for aesthetics rather than sound. But the bigger problem (also related to aesthetics) is that the speakers face the wrong bloody way. Sound is worse on my new HDTV than it was on my old, analogue, SD, flat panel, which had speakers at the bottom, facing forwards.

So what to do? Didn’t want another 5:1 system, can’t be arsed, and in the real world, people sit all around the room, not in the middle of the soundfield. I looked at sound bars, but could’t see a way of making one work, given limited space and that it would block the infra-red receiver at the bottom of the TV. My kids have got a terrible habit of leaving things in front of it as it is.

And then I saw the Bose Solo, and it looked like it might be ideal, apart from a couple of niggles. Niggle number 1: I do not have golden ears (as previously stated) but my brother-in-law does, and he does’t like Bose. Doesn’t like what they do, and doesn’t like the sound of their stuff. I was prepared to ignore his opinion, however, on the grounds that I wasn’t aware of another solution.

Niggle number 2 was the price. With all Bose products, you suspect you’re paying a brand premium, and once I became aware that there were in fact alternatives, I turned elsewhere.

Considered (briefly) a couple of options, based on online reviews, but dismissed them because they were either only available from online retailers I’d never used before*, or because they lacked features/connectivity, or because they looked as if they’d be too small for my 42″ Sony.

The Panasonic SC-HTE80 looked like it would do the trick. £100 cheaper than the Bose (and even cheaper than that through Amazon), with decent write-ups, given the price.

What did I want it for? My main beef is not actually cinema-style surround and thundering bass, which is why I never really got on with the dust-catching sub-woofer I had before. My beef, as a 50+ year-old bloke is with dialogue. Testing my ears recently, I discovered I can’t hear anything above around 16 KHz. My wife, who had a perforated ear drum some years ago, can’t hear above 13 kHz. When we’re watching TV dramas, we both struggle to hear dialogue against background noise and music. Watching Modern Family on DVD/Blu-Ray, we were forced to put the volume of the TV up to 60% (normal comfortable listening level on the louder channels being around 30-35%).

The Panasonic was easy to set up. It just fits under my Sony 42, being exactly the same width as the base and just 2 cm deeper. I lifted the TV and my daughter shoved it underneath. Any bigger TV or base, you’re going to have to position it on a shelf underneath. It has two HDMI ports (clearly labelled) and an optical. There’s also a USB, but that’s for servicing only. There are also two RCA analogue audio inputs. You connect your blu-ray to one HDMI port and your TV to the other. My Sony has an ARC (Audio Return Channel) HDMI port, so that’s the one to use. Without this, you might have to resort to an optical (TOSLINK) cable.

(I buy Amazon Basics cables. DO NOT pay the prices charged by John Lewis etc. Amazon offer useful 2-pack, with an HDMI and a TOSLINK in the same packet for £8.99. This is below their new £10 threshold for free delivery, however.)

This set up worked perfectly. Even though my set-up includes a Humax Freeview tuner/recorder, the sound from the TV (watching stuff recorded on the Humax) comes through the Panasonic speaker board as soon as it starts up. Don’t worry that you might not notice the difference! The SC-HTE80 immediately sounds richer, fuller, and more detailed than the TV speakers. Switching off the Panasonic to A-B it, it was actually shocking to realise I’d been putting up with the sound from it for so long.

As I said, my ears are not golden, but I could instantly hear the dialogue more clearly, and (watching something I’d already watched once), I noticed details that were impossible to hear before. Someone walks back to their car: footsteps. More information about locations in the form of subtle background sounds. The SC-HTE80 sports two (60W per channel) sub-woofers, which port out of the back. The directional higher frequencies come at you from the two (30W per channel) speakers at the front. The supplied remote allows you to go through the various modes (see below) using the front LED display as a guide. Push the Bluetooth button and you can pair the SC-HTE80 with your phone, computer, or tablet. I tried it with my iPad and played some music through: sounded great. So now we have a living room Bluetooth speaker, not that I imagine we’ll use it much.

Modes
- Standard (for your bog-standard drama/comedy viewing)
- Stadium (live sport – I’ll never use this mode)
- Music (for when you connect via Bluetooth, or watch concert films?)
- Cinema (Hmm… 3D sound, movie style? But what about dialogue?)
- News
- Stereo (switch off all the algorithms and just listen in stereo)
You can also adjust the level of certain features: the sub woofer can be turned up or down. The Dialogue can be adjusted in the same way – if you really struggle with it (there are 4 levels). There’s a harmonic bass effect that can be turned on or off (I don’t know what that is**). There’s also an on/off option for 3D clear dialogue, which makes it sound as if it’s coming from the TV screen and not underneath it. A couple of other adjustments, including Auto Gain Control, which is for preventing the SUPER LOUD ADVERT PROBLEM.

The unit also has a NFC chip for pairing with a phone that has one of those. Mine doesn’t.

I watched a couple of TV dramas, and then a couple of films.The Adjustment Bureau was the first. The sound was all right, and I tried the cinema mode. Sound was rich, but I struggled to hear dialogue (especially when crunching smokehouse almonds), so I turned that up a notch, and then just resorted to Standard mode, which is where I think it’ll stay, unless I’m playing music through it.

Very happy with this, and will not want to go back to watching TV without it.

Notes

* Sorry, other online retailers, but here’s the thing. I hate what Amazon have done to everyone else, I do, but they’ve got my credit card details, they don’t spam me, and I’ve never once had an issue with them since, what was it, 1998? Touch wood. Every time I buy anything from anyone else, on the other hand, I get a load of unwanted emails, I have to remember yet another password (no, we really shouldn’t use the same password for everything), and little niggles spring up. Niggles such as the use of Yodel as a delivery service. Or saying something’s in stock when it isn’t, John Lewis.

** My best guess: compressed sound loses harmonic detail. Most of what we watch and listen to these days is compressed. Digital TV: compressed. DVD: compressed. Downloaded music: compressed. BBC iPlayer: very compressed. I’m guessing that the Harmonic Bass effect puts this back, in some artificial way. I’m also guessing that watching HD content on blu-ray, you might want to switch this feature off, which is why it’s an option. I may be wrong about all of the above, of course, so check with your local golden-eared sound guru.
Tunnel*

January 3rd, 2014

Clémence Poésy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s a scene in episode seven of Tunnel, the Anglo-French version of the Danish-Swedish cop drama The Bridge (Bron/Broen – keep up at the back) in which the British cop (played by Stephen Dillane) expresses disbelief that the public would do such a thing as vote on the question of which of two children, potential victims of the series’ serial killer, should survive. But of course, vote they do.

This scene made me think about the themes of the show, and whether it worked as well in French/English as it did in Danish/Swedish. Does the tunnel work as a metaphor in the same way as the bridge, for example?

It was an obvious move, I guess, though any border crossing between any two European countries could have been used, without the clunky bridging metaphor. A bridge spans a gap and offers easier communication and potential peace, love, and understanding. The American version goes straight for a bridge: easy, and much better television. A tunnel, on the other hand, hides under the ground/sea and is a bit of a pain in the backside to use, and instead stands for hidden things, guerrilla warfare, ignorance, being in the dark, struggling towards the light. It’s also cramped and not very visual when it comes to the opening body-cut-in-half sequence.

Clémence Poésy plays Elise as a virtual clone of the Swedish version (Saga), whereas Dillane seems to channel Michael Kitchen in Foyles War. This makes him seem more sympathetic and a better cop, though he makes similar mistakes to his Danish counterpart in the bedroom department. His wife is played by Guinevere from Merlin, who doesn’t look right in 21st century clothing.

The key villain, apart from the actual villain, is a journalist, as he was in the original. This journalist is a tabloid hack, who aims his work at the lowest common denominator, showing nothing but contempt for both his material and his audience.

All of which made me think. There’s no getting away from the fact that this Canal+ co-production is made in conjunction with Shine, which is of course part of News Corp/Fox, and headed by one of the Murdochs.

So. Contempt for the audience? Tabloid journalist as the lowest of the low? The public being asked to vote on something, as in some ghastly reality show? Are these mixed messages, or is there one big one?

Who is to blame, after all, for the low blows of tabloid stories? Why are journalists so underhand, nasty, and venal? While I was watching this, in France, a journalist supposedly disguised himself as a priest in order to gain access to Michael Schumacher’s hospital room. Whose hunger do they feed? Throughout the programme, the killer manipulates both the cops and the general population into acting out on his behalf. He directs anger at capitalist enterprises and the tendency of those in the private profit sector to put profit before people. A laudable message, of course, except in this case it is portrayed as coming from an unhinged fanatic. And those who do his bidding are portrayed as a pitchfork-wielding, molotov cocktail-throwing mob.

Ah, the crowd and the mob. While our killer critiques capitalists, they’re only ever portrayed as doing what comes naturally. Sure, they treat people badly, but only because the public demands low, low prices. Which we do. So when the mob attacks the sportswear shop that sells the shoes made in far-Eastern sweatshops, who is being critiqued?

I think the answer, as always, is the mob. It’s the mob who buys tabloids and swallows their lies; it’s the mob who walks around in cheap clothing made in sweatshops; it’s the mob that habitually votes in trashy reality shows. It’s the mob that demands the Leveson Inquiry, and the mob, on Twitter, who goes baying after stories, real and fake, bullying people into apologies, or worse. (I’ve noticed a new trolling tendency, on the Twitter. Some ass posts a link or a photo, and urges Twitter to “do your thing.”) Giving the people what they want is hardly noble, but we are all implicated. It’s a right wing message: capitalism may be horrible, but we are all horrible together, so shut up. The classic capitalist response to any activist is to fixate on some minor hypocrisy: you shop at Amazon, or you drink at Starbucks, you wear clothes made in sweatshops, so shut up.

So, is the tunnel an apt metaphor? We are deep underground, helpless, out of control, and struggling towards the light. We live in ignorance and struggle to know truths that are true and uncompromised by hypocrisy and lies. In episode eight, the cops are arguing about the relative lack of CCTV in France. One of the French cops says, “But, civil liberties…” and the English cop shouts, “FUCK CIVIL LIBERTIES!”

Yes, because without the cameras, we are all in the tunnel. Fuck Civil Liberties could be the motto of most cop shows, right?

It’s a good adaptation, though bleak and depressing, as these things tend to be.

*Tunnel is what it says on the box for the French boxed set. In Britain, it’s known as The Tunnel, I know. My version was the French one, which had English on the soundtrack, but only had French subtitles – none in English for the French sections. If I hadn’t already seen The Bridge, I might have been lost.
My nine favourite podcasts (and two more I tolerate)

January 3rd, 2014

BBC Broadcasting House, Portland Place at the head of Regent Street, London (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In an ideal world, I’d just listen to the radio when I was on holiday in France, but unfortunately we only have occasional access to wifi, and the 3G I get through Orange France (using a French SIM) is not that fast on top of our hill and relatively expensive.

Which leaves me downloading podcasts whenever I visit my brother-in-law’s (aka the internet café), and working through them over a couple of days. Here are my favourites, and some I sometimes use but enjoy a lot less. I admit there’s a preponderance of BBC output, but wading through everything else in search of something I’d enjoy seems like too much hard work. I generally dislike the American broadcasting style, and find interruptions for sponsor messages irritating. The BBC provides high quality output and, after all, I paid for it.

Podcasts are not just for holidays, of course. They’re perfect for Richard Bacon avoidance, or Radio 4 Sunday morning output avoidance. My new kitchen radio has Bluetooth, so I’ll be able to broadcast podcasts from my phone whenever something shit is on.

In Our Time

The Big Daddy of podcasts, In Our Time is by now a vast resource of interesting discussions on a high variety of topics. Sure, you have to put up with Melvin Bragg, and you’re never going to get any depth, but you’ll learn enough to catch an interest, and might be prompted to further reading and research. You have to love the concept: get three experts in the field together in a studio to discuss a topic. The only real problem is the 45 minute running time, which is never long enough. I tend to pick and choose and prefer the science topics, but I’m not averse to a bit of history. This week, I listened to one about the Medicis. The great thing about In Our Time is that it’s a good listen while you’re rustling something up in the kitchen, or you can put it on as background and have a nice sleep. It can be very soporific. There are so many of them that you’ll never run out. Probably.

More or Less

One of my favourite Radio 4 shows is this brilliant half-hour about statistics in the news. Never fails to leave you better informed, and is key to taking all figures and statistics in the media with a pinch of salt. The show often asks the question, is it a big number? A classic example of this was when Osborne was railing about waste in the CPS and complaining about the amount of printing they do every day. Turns out not to have been a big number at all. When not on R4, there’s a 10-minute version on the World Service.

Friday Night Comedy

It’s either going to be the News Quiz or the Now Show. Neither are top drawer, but both are enjoyable enough for a bath time, or can be listened to during a meal. The kids enjoy them. We’d all rather have I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue – what’s up with that not being a podcast.

The History Hour

One of my favourites, this, collecting the World Service Witness strand into one hour of podcast joy. A variety of historical topics, mini packages, complete with interviews. Always interesting, and even if not, there’s be an interesting topic along in a minute.

From Our Own Correspondent

Could be considered worthy-but-dull, and is not always the most cheerful experience, but this is a great listen for soft news, background, and colour, and far more interesting than the hard news and breaking news that obsesses the media. It offers a wide variety of content, and the best of 2013 supercut was a great listen.

The Talk Show

I rarely listen to an entire episode of John Gruber’s The Talk Show, but when I’m in the mood for a completely obsessive discussion of Apple/tech minutiae, this is where I turn. I might survive an hour of the typical 90-100 minute running time. There are usually three sponsor messages, which can be irritating.

Thinking Allowed/The Media Show/Feedback

These afternoon half-hour shows are usually worth a listen. I’ll happily stick with these if they’re on when I happen to be in the car or kitchen, and they’re worth downloading as podcasts. Laurie Taylor is a fine broadcaster, and his sociological strand is generally interesting. The Media Show, along with More or Less, should be essential listening to all students of Media. Feedback is also a useful resource for Media students, as you often hear BBC News bods squirming when confronted with criticism of their preposterous overspending and ridiculous reporting. All three programmes are presented by people who are more independent voices – not necessarily spouting the standard BBC line.

iPM

In the absence of Eddie Mair’s PM, which would be a joy to download the day after it’s broadcast (please, BBC), I usually enjoy this, the weekend show that “starts with its listeners”. One of PM’s reporters puts together a package following contact from a listener. It often appears as if this might be an unpromising listen, but I’ve yet to actually be bored by an episode of this. The PM production team know how to put a package together.

What the Papers Say

Presented by different journalists each week, this 15-minute slot used to be a staple of late night TV. I don’t think it’s quite as good as it used to be in its television heyday, and some of the journos can be objectionable, but it’s still worth a download, and is perfect for shower time.

Kermode/Mayo Film Reviews aka Wittertainment

Hmm. I’ve gone through stages on this. At the moment, I can’t stand listening to Kermode, having fixated on his habit of not finishing sentences. If he’s got a cold, he can be a bit of a drone, too, not interrupted often enough by Mayo. On the other hand, it’s far more entertaining as a podcast than it is when broadcast live, interrupted as it is by news, sport, travel, trailers, stingers, etc. Best experienced when some of the substitute reviewers are in town during one of Kermode’s frequent holidays.

Best of Today

I generally hate this, but in the absence of regular news from home, I’ll download it in a pinch. It’s just a selection of packages and/or discussions, but rarely offers anything intelligent or properly interesting, and is frequently infuriating in the way of most of Today’s output. In desperation only, because the truth is, there is no “best” of Today. It’s all “worst”.